Sunday, July 23, 1pmJoin us as Maya Gurantz presents a public, interactive lecture-demonstration on Bertolt Brecht’s The Measures Taken. Written for workers’ choruses in the 1930s, Brecht’s lehrstuck, or learning plays, marked one of the earliest attempts at what contemporary art would refer to as Social Practice. In The Measures Taken, Agitators attempt to convince a Control Chorus (performed by the workers’ chorus) that they did the right thing by killing a Young Comrade, re-enacting the events leading up to his death to demonstrate that they were operating on behalf of the collective good.

With tensions rising between Kim Jong-un and the Trump Administration, the West Coast finds itself again under the shadow of nuclear threat. As part of the show “Herd” at Angels Gate Cultural Center, artists Maura Brewer + Maya Gurantz imaginatively recuperate the “defensive capabilities” of Angels Gate Cultural Center, originally Fort MacArthur–a military installation and the main site of Los Angeles coastal defense during the Cold War, with an outdoor light installation facing and speaking to North Korea, and video and didactic posters installed in the gallery.

Performances created by Brewer + Gurantz will critically explore the tensions between individual identity, needs, desires–and the collective good; in so doing, asking viewers to imagine a world in which such things are configured differently.

MUTUAL CRITICISM, A HISTORY

Sunday, July 16, 1pm

Join us for a lecture-demonstration on the history of mutual criticism, a group ritual in which one person willingly offers themselves up for critique by the collective as an act of self-abnegation. From the Oneida Community to Synanon, progressives, communists and cultists have frequently employed strategies of mutual criticism to break down barriers between individuals and foster allegiance to a group. Using primary source documentation (transcriptions, video, etc.) from the 1850s to the present, we will produce a taxonomy of mutual criticism while also subjecting each other to the process. In so doing, we examine how forms of de-subjectivation might be reactivated in the present as a form of resistance against a regime that privileges personal gain above all else.

The Association of Hysteric Curators is circulating the below open letter addressing the recent opening of a major Carl Andre retrospective at MOCA. Signatures are still in progress; the below represents signatures at time of publication. To add your name, visit this link. Dear Philippe Vergne, We, The Association of Hysteric Curators, are extremely disappointed […]

“it has still been one of the most innovative and relevant art pieces of the year, touching on race and class dynamics, gentrification, technology, and the increasing rarity of people’s willingness to step out of their comfort zones.”

Thank you, East Bay Express, for your sensitive coverage and for honoring us!

I’ve been thinking about Do The Right Thing. Saw it Saturday night at Cinespia’s summer screening series at Hollywood Forever (Questlove spinning before and after! Great night!). Lurking under the surface of that film has always been something for me that I’m finally able to understand–in my head at least. I’m going to try to articulate it here in words. Which is the strange representation of both time and space and the strange ways it elevates the allegorical quality of the narrative.

Like many of Lee’s joints, the characters are archetypal. They stand for something. They stand in for something.

This quality feels stiltedly dialectical and burdensome in Get On the Bus–a particularly excruciating low point when the men discuss how they were raised by their mothers.

It reaches a profound, meta-critical apex in Bamboozled, the thesis of which is revealed exactly half-way through the movie: Pierre Delacroix’s (Damon Wayans) estranged father, a standup comic named Junebug (Paul Mooney), tells him with tossed-off frankness that lands with the impact of concrete that “every nigger is an entertainer.” One realizes at that moment–the film’s purpose has been to present a taxonomy of the ways black people must perform in America–and the main conflict for our lead characters has been, will always be–what role will each choose to perform? What will the consequences be for playing that role?

In Do The Right Thing, the characters are meant to stand in for the typical characters who might populate the Brooklyn Bed-Stuy neighborhood of the 1980s. Kindly Neighborhood Drunk. Street-Corner Philosophers. Crew of Goofballs. White Gentrifier. Responsible Older Sister speaking for positivity and responsibility. Pizzeria Owner, Minor Godfather of his Tiny Kingdom, all Italian paternalism, with his sons Hothead Malcontent and Spineless Patsy. Uptight Korean Shop Owners. They are introduced not as people but as leitmotifs over the first 10 minutes, in solos, pairs and trios, like dancers.

Lee presents racial tension in its full, daily complexity–not at something that can be solved. Every character’s desire and attempt to carve out his or her own place in this world–is a part of it. It’s a fable of intractability and contradiction.

And yet, in Do the Right Thing (rightly considered Lee’s masterpiece in this, its 25th anniversary year), there’s this incredible sweet spot between the allegory and these well observed performances of humanity–human, tender, flawed. But it isn’t just the stand-ins talking to each other that elevates the as modern-day allegory.

Famously, the film takes place on one block over one day. Meaning that at no point during that day is any character more than half a block from one another–these characters run into each other every 10 minutes. They are forever in each other’s peripheral vision. And yet, somehow, every time they encounter each other it’s like a new day–like a new surprise. Like everyone on the block has no short-term memory.

Geographically, the single block that extends endlessly, large enough to contain fully supported businesses but also all love, hate, death, rage. Radio Raheem endlessly walking the same block with his same song. Baby son Hector constantly asleep. Mother-Sister constantly watches. But it’s always new. Or at least always Now.

And every new encounter is a new opportunity to be having a Big Conversation, the ones that rumble underneath our daily lives with our loved ones and neighbors and colleagues, but rarely get spoken and usually perform themselves as subtext: Why are you unable to keep a job? Why do we stay in this neighborhood? Why are you so angry all the time? Why do you take shit from your brother? How dare you live in this neighborhood? Why can’t you be more positive about the struggle? Why aren’t there brothers up on the wall? Do you love me? What is it about race, anyway?

It is that radical collision–between the suffocating intimacy of one day on one block–next to the heightened stakes of these conversations, ones that we usually don’t have–that saves the film from dialectic bathos, that rather stretches the viewer’s head out of shape in the attempt to absorb what’s going on.

In the early oughts, my cousin Vered Tom and I translated Hefetz, a play by Israeli legend Hanokh Levin. Levin’s worlds were like this–large-scale consequences played out in tiny intimate family stages. Similarly, the action of the play moves comes from the characters speaking in subtext–speaking out loud what cannot be spoken. It gives it an undeniably raw, forward propulsion.

All of eternity, all the great questions, all our major human conflicts are squeezed into one house, one family. One block. One pizzeria.

In January, Ellen Sebastian Chang and I created A Hole in Space (Oakland Redux), a video installation commissioned by the Great Wall of Oakland. We received incredible feedback about the project, and got local, national and international notice in publications including the East Bay Express, FastCompany, and Citylab in the Atlantic Magazine. (You can access all the links from this page).

On Friday, May 8, as part of the Oakland Museum of California’s special exhibition, Who is Oakland–and their Friday Nights at OMCA, a weekly party at the museum which includes food and music and drink–we will be holding a screening of some of the footage from A Hole in Space, and having a public conversation about the experience afterward. Please come, and tell your Bay Area friends!

OMCA Film & Artist Talk | A Hole in Space

Friday, May 8, 2015, 7 pm

In the spirit of special exhibition Who is Oakland? OMCA screens an evocative film piece, A Hole in Space, which captures a unique form of dialogue between people in different neighborhoods of Oakland. In January 2015, artists Maya Gurantz and Ellen Sebastian Chang created video “portals” between distinct Oakland neighborhoods that are geographically close, but socially and economically worlds apart. Their efforts resulted in an exchange of mutual discovery, acknowledgment, and understanding, against a backdrop of the current gentrification and economic unrest in the city. Commissioned by the Great Wall of Oakland, the work is inspired by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s seminal 1980 new media art project A Hole in Space.

This program in OMCA’s Lecture Hall features footage from the installation, followed by a Q&A about the Oakland-specific issues that arose from this unique form of neighborhood-to-neighborhood conversation. Panelists include:

filmmakers Maya Gurantz and Ellen Sebastian Chang

artist Chris Treggiari, whose work can be seen in special exhibition Who is Oakland?

Michelle Clark, The Youth Employment Partnership, Inc.

Meghann Farnsworth, The Center for Investigative Reporting

Before or after the screening, visit special exhibition Who is Oakland? in the Gallery of California Art.

Included with Museum admission. Admission is first come, first served, and seating is limited. During Friday Nights @ OMCA, from 5 to 9 pm, admission is half-price for adults, free for ages 18 and under. Admission for Members is always free.

For the past year, I’ve been developing this project in collaboration with Ellen Sebastian Chang and the support of the Great Wall of Oakland. It finally went up last week, and here’s the first article about it. We have a lot of footage we will be sharing, and more about it on the project website and my own.

If I had to rank the #1 strangest experience from my 20th high school reunion last weekend it would be the black hole of memory.

Often you see a person from long ago and after a few seconds you can begin to remember their face, if dimly. Or if they’ve physically changed too much–weight, gray hair–the name can somehow ring a distant bell, even if there’s no depth charge of emotion behind it–kind of like “oh yeah that guy.”

But some people are just a void. They recall nothing to you and the nothingness can be astonishing.

It was such a person who saw me and recognized me and pointed and said loudly, “You!”

Me? I tried to recognize him, his name. Nothing. I was on my 4th Jack and Coke at this point of the evening, and woozily considered the profundity of such an absolute lack of recall as he continued:

“You! You’re the only person who gave me shit about my Buckwheat costume!”

I barely had time to process a response but he kept going–“The three black guys who went to our high school, they didn’t have a problem with it! They were like, ‘naw, it’s cool.'”

Ok. Ok ok ok ok ok. I have no memory of this. Though it does sound like me.

My San Diego high school was, straight up, Clueless. I remember being in the theater with my friends when that movie came out, shrieking with laughter at its sarcastic portrayal of our SoCal teen milieu. We were the only ones laughing because no one else in the theater seemed to get that it was a satire.

Torrey Pines was every Cali high school cliche, the kind of place where the surfers surfed, the stoners stoned, the kids drove new Mercedes, the girls got drunk date raped on their way back from Tijuana, and the administration had a Christian theater group come do a play for a school-wide assembly whose lessons were: 1) all guys want to have sex, 2) no girls want to have sex but they do because their boyfriends pressure them into it. The girls then 3) always regret it, 4) get pregnant, and plus by the way 5) ABORTION IS BAD. (As a nascent theater director, I seem to remember that play pretty well, including a maudlin final scene where the lead girl lights a 1st birthday candle on a cake for the child she gave up for adoption.)

It was the kind of place where someone might think it’s ok to dress up as Buckwheat for Halloween. And yeah, I guess the three black guys didn’t say they had a problem with it because if you are one of three black guys in a school of 2000 mostly white kids and you’ve essentially been brought in by some wealthy dads to play on their sons’ football team and some aggro guy comes up to you and says “Hey, man, do you have a problem with my Buckwheat costume?”, you’re probably not going to say, “Yes. In fact I do. It’s offensive and stupid, and let me explain to you why.”

I’m sure that guy was right, that I was the only one to give him shit for it–although now that I think about it–didn’t the teachers or administration say anything? Probably not. And that is why, perhaps, this one event doesn’t stand out in my memory–because this kind of offensive bullshit happened so often. The culture I grew up in was deeply offensive to me.

And now that I think about it, I’m starting to remember something. Which was that I was angry all the time. I felt trapped in the culture, targeted and humiliated for being an outlier, judged, too smart for these idiots, not pretty enough, counting the minutes, the seconds, until I could escape to the mythical land of college where there would be other people like me.

I lashed out a lot–at my enemies and my friends too–because I did not yet know how to pick my battles. At that age, everything felt like a battle. Battle was my daily state of being–little relief from the fight or flight instinct. As you can imagine, this made me not much fun to be around. It made me not much fun to be.

Anyway, for the most part, the reunion was a quite innocuous, lacking in much viscerality. A bland, perfectly pleasant affair. It’s been a long time. It’s too early for entertaining plastic surgery (either that, or people have excellent surgeons who keep a light touch on the Botox). Some of the guys, hilariously enough, did look like the douchebag golf club extras from the movie Caddyshack. You realize that 38 years of age looks very different on different people. And there were a surprising number of people whom I felt very warmed to see.

But that story–even though it remains a void in my memory–reminds me of everything and everywhere I was 20 years ago.